The House of Shattered Wings Read Free Page B

to do anything like this.
    Her gaze moved, at last, to the Fallen. A young girl, black-haired, olive-skinned, sharp-featured, looking for all the world as if she’d just come from Marseilles or Montpellier. In the brief interval, her innate magic had had time to start healing the worst of her broken bones, though neither her wings nor the two fingers she’d lost would ever regrow. There were rules and boundaries set on the Fallen: the bitter cage of their existence on Earth that they all learned to live in.
    â€œI heard from Madeleine,” Javier said. “She’s on her way with a couple helpers. Should be there in a couple minutes.”
    â€œGood,” Selene said. “Go and prepare the car, will you?” She looked again at the young man, at the foreign features of his face. Annamites were a familiar sight in the city: they were citizens of France, after all, albeit, like all colonial subjects, second-rate ones. Emmanuelle, Selene’s lover, manifested as African; but Emmanuelle was a Fallen who had never left Paris in her life. Whatever the young man was, he was not and had never been a Fallen.
    â€œAs you wish,” Javier said. “I’ll send you the helpers to pick her up.”
    Selene shook her head. “Not just her. We’ll have two passengers this time, Javier.”
    She didn’t know what the young man was, but she most definitely intended to find out.

TWO
    ESSENCE OF LOSS
    MADELEINE d’Aubin, alchemist of House Silverspires, had seen more than her share of prone bodies brought in at the dead of the night: she slept little these days, in any case, spending her nights in her laboratory, remembering the past and what it had cost her.
    She arrived in one of the largest rooms of the admissions wing of Hôtel-Dieu, the House’s hospital: row after row of metal beds, all unoccupied save two. Two doctors in white blouses hovered by the new arrivals’ side, and her assistant, Oris, was waiting for her, leaning against the wall and trying to appear casual; though his face was sallow in the dim light.
    She nodded at Oris and went to his side, pulling a chair so she could sit. Madeleine dropped her heavy shoulder bag onto the floor, and settled down to wait in silence.
    The room was dusty and the air dry, and her wasted lungs wouldn’t take it: a cough welled up. She desperately tried to quench the trickle that was going to become a cough, but it was never enough. The bout that followed racked her from head to toe—she was going to choke to death, never finding fresh, wholesome air again.
    At last she sat back, wrung out, enjoying the sweetness of uninterrupted breath. One of the doctors—Aragon, surely—was looking straight at her with disapproval. Madeleine waved a hand, letting him know it was nothing. She’d lied about it; told him it was too much breathing the Paris air, of the areas around the blackened flow of the Seine—he’d seen so many combatants with the same problems that he’d been all too ready to believe her. She was not proud, but she was safe. The last thing that’d occur to him, prim and proper as he was, would be to question her; to realize how wasted her lungs were, and the true cause of such extensive and fast-progressing damage.
    At length, the doctors peeled away from the beds, and one of them removed his mask. Madeleine found herself staring at Aragon’s sharp features. The Fallen doctor looked, like Oris, on the verge of exhaustion, his skin pale and beaded with sweat, his graying hair slick against his temples.
    â€œShouldn’t you be asleep?” Madeleine asked, after the brief pleasantries were over. Unlike her, Aragon was paid for his work, not a dependent of the House, or bound in Selene’s service.
    Aragon shook his head. His colleague had left the room already, no doubt heading for the comfort of his own bed. “For something like this? You know she wouldn’t let me